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Stealth mechanics in Heroes of the Storm is getting a major rework

POSTED BY Ralph Nicolo Manaloto ON November 28, 2017

Earlier this month at BlizzCon 2017, Blizzard announced a couple of big gameplay changes for Heroes of the Storm for 2018. One of the major updates is a reworked stealth mechanic, which aims to better balance stealth gameplay in both low-level pub games and high-level competitive matches.

Currently, stealth heroes have a shimmer visual effect, which can be hard to see by a significant portion of the HotS playerbase, thereby giving stealth hero players too much of an advantage. On the flip side, some can quickly spot the shimmer effect which can render the stealth hero useless. Blizzard dubbed the effect as an “eye test,” and they plan to remove the mechanic by changing the look of stealthed heroes:

As you can see in the GIF above, stealth heroes are now much easier to spot. While this may seemingly render stealth useless, heroes in stealth mode will still not appear on the minimap, and can only be directly targeted by abilities.

Stealth heroes will also have a new Invisible state, which renders them completely invisible after remaining immobile for a short amount of time (1.5 seconds to be exact). This means that while immobile, the hero will not show any visual effect at all, that is until they move are are damaged by an ability. To balance this mechanic, heroes cannot be Invisible on active objectives and capture points.

These changes are just a quick look on reworked stealth as a whole, given that each of the stealth heroes have slightly different mechanics. For a more in-depth look at the changes per stealth hero, visit Blizzard’s official stealth rework page here.